The Writing Block

Ma keeps bemoaning the fact that I don’t write anymore.

Tui koto likhtish, kobita, golpo…aajkaal aar kichu likhish na (You used to write so much, poems, stories…nowaways you don’t write anything), she complains.

Sadly, this is very true and the reason is, I think, a mixture of a grown up horror (in itself a tad pretentious) at the pretentiousness of the solemn poems that I wrote when I was younger and sheer laziness of mind.

When you are a kid you can unabashedly think of rhyming words and then ‘construct you poem’ around it (though, of course, you don’t think of the process of poetry writing in such grandiose terms). I remember one of my poems going as:

I have a sister who can dance

I have a sister who is in France
I have a sister who is naughty
I have a sister who is haughty…

And so on… The cuteness of these poems are ‘awwwwd’ at, and rightly so. And then comes the stage where you have to compose solemn, serious verse pondering on the meaning of life and deep metaphysical questions (‘On Death’, ‘Life’, and so on). Most of us ‘budding poets’ have been through this phase. I have written poems on how no one can defeat death and on how thoughts keep flitting in out mind, sometimes ‘melancholic’ and sometimes ‘incandescent’.

And then comes a stage, at least it came for me, when you look back on what you have written and cannot help but cringe at the pompousness and pretentiousness of it. When I read some of the earlier stuff that I had written so enthusiastically, I really wonder how I got away with it all. However, despite this, there was a simplicity and honesty to my writing then that I really miss now. I imitated, I copied, I used whatever means of writing I knew and could think of, but ultimately I wrote for myself. I wrote in all innocence because I loved writing and writing made me happy. Come to think of it, I wasn’t too fussed about how my work turned out or what others would make of it.

So, now when I do get my super lazy mind to move out its nearly constant state of inertia and produce something, I inevitably end up dismissing what it produces as plain and simple trash. Perhaps it is just my ‘enhanced literary critical insight’ that refuses to see merit in a mediocre work, or it is just grown up me unable to write from the heart anymore. It is the writer in me unable to write for her pleasure anymore without thinking of how others (including the critic in me) will receive it. Or perhaps…I just can’t write.


Words…
I wish they would flow out like the gushing waters of a waterfall,
Pure, sparkling, effervescent.
But right now they trickle out like water out of a municipal tap,
Slow, infrequent, and inconsistent.